Quotes About Myth

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, "Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.

Hooker was falsely thought to be the origin of the word for "prostitute," because his camp was so rowdy.

With her bad luck, scruffy passengers and drunken sailing, the Mayflower is still our glorious origin myth.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them. Most societies glorify mothers, as if the mere act of giving birth makes them inherently capable of nurturing. That's simply not true.

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.

The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York's Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero's pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement.

Not only did the angry villagers hound their monsters to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches.

The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.

It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn't it.

It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.

history is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material

Robin smiled meekly, as if she were confronting a mythical troll and was afraid to get too close.

It seems the myth survives in our culture still, that a young girl's worth, measured against that of a great man, may be of lesser consequence… I would say rather that a man who treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having done so. There is art, and there are artists. Let's not confuse the two.

En un extremo están esas narraciones alucinadas sobre sirenas que no eran sirenas, sino manatíes, y grifos que no eran grifos, sino cóndores; en el otro está el esperpento valleinclanesco. En un extremo está el pariente remoto de la <>, esa osadía típicamente latinoamericana; en el otro, el antepasado inmediato de aquel fatigado cliché del dictador, que nuestra realidad política sigue dando por válido.

Ya se sabe, a veces uno es víctima de sus propios mitos

Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend

Snoring keeps the monsters away.

Maybe paradise is overrated.

I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.

Troya, Micenas, Knossos... ciudades que durante siglos se creyó que pertenecían al mundo de los mitos pero que Schliemann, Evans y otros arqueólogos se empeñaron en demostrar su existencia y lo lograron

But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.